WASHINGTON, DC—While working parents in the United States struggle
to find and afford private child care of even mediocre quality, parents
in most European countries easily find publicly funded programs
offering good-to-excellent care. This is according to University of
Massachusetts-Amherst sociologists Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel,
writing in the Fall/Winter 2002 issue of Contexts magazine, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Sociological Association.

Using a comparative perspective, Clawson and Gerstel synthesize a
large body of research in their article, “Caring for Our Young: Child
Care in Europe and the United States,” in which they examine the social
and political assumptions underlying the quality and types of care
available across countries. The researchers point out that the
different models of child care “challenge us to think … more broadly
about childhood, parenting and the kind of society we value.”

Their assessment of the U.S. and European child-care systems reveals
sharp contrasts and provides an opportunity to analyze these countries’
differing goals. Should child care emphasize education or play? Parents
or peers? Organized care or parental involvement? According to the
authors, rethinking U.S. child-care policies is particularly timely,
given recent changes in welfare, employment, and family patterns. But,
funding for child care is fragmentary, and reforms are generally not
made with consideration of the goals for the kind of system that is
emerging or being created.

Over the past several decades, there has been a heightened demand in
the United States for child-care services. Clawson and Gerstel note
that almost half of children less than one year old now spend a good
portion of their day in some form of non-parental care. With expert
opinions emphasizing the potential benefits of child care (e.g., a
recent report of the National Academy of Sciences noted, “Higher
quality care is associated with outcomes that all parents want to
see….”), even the U.S. Congress generally reflects the view that child
care is good, a radical departure from perspectives of several decades
ago. Congress may be focusing on the fact that by keeping families
together and kids in school, these programs save money in the long run.

There are many shortcomings in the current U.S. child-care system.
Clawson and Gerstel call it a “fragmentary patchwork both at the level
of the individual child and at the level of the overall system.”
Publicly funded child-care programs, for example, are restricted to the
poor. The authors also point out that “while most parents believe (or
want to believe) that their children receive quality care, standardized
ratings find most of the care mediocre and much of it seriously
inadequate…. Recent research [also] suggests that the quality of care
for young children is poor or fair in well over half of child care
settings. This low quality of care, in concert with a model of
intensive mothering, means that many anxious mothers privately hunt for
high-quality substitutes while trying to ensure they are not really
being replaced.”

European countries provide thought-provoking alternative models of
child care. For example, focusing on differences between the systems
available in France and Denmark, the authors find that French child
care is intended primarily as early education and is open to all
children, regardless of socioeconomic status. Almost 100 percent of
French three-, four-, and five-year-olds are enrolled in the full-day,
free écoles maternelles; all are part of the same national system, with
the same curriculum, staffed by teachers paid good wages by the same
national ministry. Denmark’s child care system, on the other hand,
offers a “nonschool model,” and is intended to aid working parents, not
educate children.

The cost of the French child care is not cheap. However, in France,
child care costs are considered to be a social responsibility and are
publicly funded, while in the U.S., parents themselves pay for these
services. As Clawson and Gerstel remind us, not caring for our children
is in the long term, and probably even in the short term, even more
expensive.

Other policies that relate to child care, such as the Family Leave
Act, are examined. The authors note that the United States provides far
less in the way of family leave than do European countries. European
policymakers now also emphasize the numbers of hours parents work as
important factors that shape the ways young children are cared for and
by whom. Workers in the United States, on average, put in far more
hours and weeks than do workers in most European countries.

The article concludes by asking what we could learn from European
systems, and what issues need to be considered in reform efforts.
Clawson and Gerstel emphasize that these fundamental questions about
the role of education, peer group interactions, and parenting in
child-care systems “address issues of social equality and force us to
rethink deep-seated images of children and parents.”

Members of the media interested in a copy of the article by Clawson
and Gerstel should contact Johanna Ebner, ASA Public Information Office
(202-383-9005 x332, pubinfo@asanet.org). Further information on ASA's Contexts magazine, published by the University of California Press in Berkeley, can be found at http://www.contextsmagazine.org.

# # #

About the American Sociological AssociationThe American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org),
founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to
serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science
and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society.